h as Tennyson
could smoke gave out at some particular city, whereupon the poet
packed up his portmanteau and returned home, breaking up the party!
The late Joseph Knight, who reviewed Rossetti's volumes in the
_Athenaeum_, vouched for the truth of this relation, which he had
heard, not only from Woolner, but also from Tennyson's brother
Septimus.

In more fashionable circles the mere possession of a pipe might be
looked at askance. Robertson's comedy "Society" was produced in 1865,
and in it, Tom Stylus, a somewhat Bohemian journalist, has the
misfortune, in a fashionable ball-room, when pulling out his
handkerchief to bring out his pipe with it from his pocket. The vulgar
thing falls upon the floor, and Tom is ashamed to claim his property
and so acknowledge his ownership of a pipe. He presently calls a
footman, who comes with a tray and sugar-tongs, picks up the offending
briar with the tongs, and carries it off "with an air of ineffable
disgust."

Undergraduates, like men of letters, did not pay much attention to the
conventional attitude of society towards tobacco, and pipes maintained
their popularity in college rooms. Thackeray, in the "Book of Snobs,"
describes youths at a University wine-party as "drinking bad wines,
telling bad stories, singing bad songs over and over again. Milk
punch--smoking--ghastly headache--frightful spectacle of dessert-table
next morning, and smell of tobacco." But the satirist is often tempted
to be epigrammatic at the expense of accuracy, and this picture is at
least too highly coloured. In the recently published memoir of
"J"--John Willis Clark--some reminiscences of the late Registrary are
included; and "J" does not recognize Thackeray's picture as quite true
of the "wines" of his undergraduate day, _i.e._ about 1850. "They
may," he says, "have 'told bad stories and sung bad songs,' as
Thackeray says in his 'Book of Snobs.' I can only say that I never
heard either the one or the other." But certainly there was noise, and
there was smoke--plenty of it. "Conversation there was none," says
"J," "only a noise. Then came smoke. In a short time the atmosphere
became dense, the dessert and the wine came to an end, and it was
chapel time (mercifully)." One story Clark tells of an extraordinary
attempt to smoke. Referring to the compulsory "chapels," he says that
as a rule everybody behaved with propriety, whether they regarded the
attendance as irksome or otherwise. But, he admits, "'Ini